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Wednesday, March 30, 2016

Pippa Norris — Why American Elections Ranked the Worst Among Western Democracies

The Electoral Integrity Project (EIP), founded in 2012, provides an independent evaluation of the quality of elections worldwide. The EIP's results have been published in several books, including my own Why Electoral Integrity Matters and Why Elections Fail - books that focus on comparing the quality of elections, understanding why problems arise, and diagnosing what can be done about these flaws.We can use the data collected by the EIP to ask: Is the U.S. the electoral role model it imagines itself to be?

Especially after the 2000 election, the US lost credibility for electoral integrity. That's a huge loss of soft power internationally and is pushing the country toward a constitutional crisis domestically as public confidence in the political process declines.